Critical Mass Page 10

  Spranger maneuvered the speedboat close, then chopped the engines, so they would drift the last few feet. He tied a line to a cleat on the platform and helped Liese up, scrambling onto the boarding ladder directly behind her.

  Reaching the main deck they went aft and entered the spacious, well-furnished main salon. Music was playing softly and champagne had been laid out for them, as usual.

  A white coated Italian waiter appeared. “Accogliere cordialmente, signore e signorina,” he said pleasantly. “Champagne tonight?”

  Spranger nodded.

  Outside, the speedboat was started and left, and seconds later the Grande Dame’s engines came to life and they began to move.

  “Please,” the little waiter motioned for them to take a seat.

  The telephone next to Spranger rang once. Putting his champagne down, he lit a cigarette then sat down and picked up the phone. “Yes?” he said English.

  “Tell us about the gentleman in the tweed coat at the airport.” the Japanese voice said in clear English.

  “I don’t know for certain,” Spranger answered, surprised that they knew about him. It meant they must have had one of their own people watching the airport. “My guess would be that he is an intelligence officer. British or American.”

  “What is being done about him?”

  “Nothing. I don’t consider him a threat at this point. Although Boorsch will be identified and probably traced back to us, we can handle the inquiries. And your position with us is very well insulated.”

  “What about Switzerland?”

  “We have the parts.”

  “I see,” the Japanese man said after a brief hesitation. “And why have you not delivered them?”

  Spranger had been expecting the question. He’d hoped it would not have come so soon, but he wasn’t going to hedge. “The parts are in a safe place, where they shall remain until we have gathered everything you contracted for. Only then will we make delivery.”

  “Why?”

  “Insurance,” Spranger said bluntly. He looked over at Liese. She was watching him, a faint smile on her lips.

  “Against what?” the man asked.

  “You.”

  “Do you consider us a threat to your well-being? We are, after all, allies once again.”

  “Allies, but not friends,” Spranger said. “Is there anything else?”

  “We could replace you, if you refuse to cooperate.”

  “No one else could do the job.”

  The man laughed. “I believe we could find someone capable. A person such as Miss Egk, for example.”

  “She could do the job,” Spranger said, once again surprised. “Unless I killed her first. Then you might never get your little toys.”

  Liese’s smile broadened. She was seated on a low couch across the salon from him. As he watched, she crossed her long, lovely legs.

  “Do we still have a contract?” Spranger asked after a moment.

  “Yes, of course. But I am worried about the man in the tweed coat, and I believe you should be worried as well. Look into it.”

  “If you think it’s important.”

  “I do.”

  “I will have to divert some resources. It will cost you …”

  “Money is no object. I have already made that quite clear.”

  “Very well,” Spranger said.

  “How soon do you expect to be in a position to fulfill the terms of our agreement?”

  “Soon.”

  “How soon? Days? Weeks? Months?”

  “Soon,” Spranger repeated, and he hung up.

  16

  ON SUNDAY MORNING SWISSAIR QUIETLY REINSTITUTED ITS flight 145 to Geneva, and though Orly had reopened almost immediately, passenger traffic on all airlines was sharply down.

  McGarvey had spent most of Saturday in the clippings library of Le Figaro, France’s leading daily newspaper, looking for background information on the STASI and what had become of its top officers. But he’d not found much beyond a series of articles published last week in which a French journalist reported that there were still thousands of KGB men and officers operating throughout what had once been East Germany, and that only the East German secret service itself had actually been dismantled by the mobs.

  Early this morning he had checked out of the Latin Quarter hotel where he’d holed up out of Tom Lynch’s way, and took a cab out to Orly.

  Mati was dead. That irrevocable fact began to settle over him like a dark, malevolent cloud as his taxi came within sight of the airport. In his mind’s eye he could see the big plume of smoke rising into the morning sky. And he could see the Stinger’s contrail. No one aboard the Airbus had so much as one chance in a million of survival. The destruction had been so complete that authorities were admitting they might never be able to properly identify even half the bodies.

  Poor Mati. She could never have envisioned that her life would end that way. Or that her death would be so misused.

  “Frankly, the sooner you are out of France the better I will feel,” Marquand had told him bluntly.

  “Are you so sure I’m interested?” McGarvey asked.

  The French intelligence officer nodded. “Had you continued to Paris after one-four-five was destroyed, I would have not been so certain. But your own actions have betrayed you, as they do all of us in the end.”

  Mati had come from Lausanne. The CIA had been sending its people at least as far as Geneva. And Marquand told him that the organization of ex-STASI officers (if such an organization existed) maintained its bank accounts in Bern and Zurich. All roads, it seemed, led to Switzerland.

  “Show your face in Lausanne, and if you are spotted by Boorsch’s friends they will assume that you are investigating them. They will come for you, then, no matter where you go or what you do.”

  Even Marquand had known about poor Mati. Everyone had, and somehow she was being used as the key, or as a lever to pry him loose from … what?

  He was out of the business. He’d told them that a dozen times. He had nothing left to give. He was, like the Cold War, an anachronism. A man whose time had passed. An idea that no longer fit. An ism that had become too dangerous in what was being called the “new world order.”

  McGarvey paid off his driver and went directly through the terminal to the Swissair boarding area. He’d made his reservations yesterday at the airline’s downtown office under his real name, giving the opposition, if there was any, time enough to react.

  Tom Lynch was waiting for him across from the gate, and he pulled McGarvey into the cocktail lounge that was half-filled with travelers. They got a table where they could watch the boarding.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the Paris chief of station asked. “We’ve turned this town upside down looking for you.”

  “I’m going to Lausanne,” McGarvey answered, watching Lynch’s eyes. The COS was an organization man. He put the Agency before personal feelings.

  “The Swiss will kick you out,” Lynch said, betraying nothing.

  “I’m going to pay my respects, Tom. Any other reason I’d be going there?”

  “I don’t know. But Murphy is screaming bloody murder for you. He’ll have your head on a platter if you don’t show up in Washington.”

  “He doesn’t have the authority.”

  Lynch looked at him with a smirk. “You’ve been around long enough to know better than that, McGarvey. The man has a long reach.”

  McGarvey leaned forward. They were calling his flight. “So do I, Tom.”

  “Are you threatening me?” Lynch demanded.

  “I had a friend aboard that flight. I’m going to Lausanne, as I said, to pay my respects. Afterward I’ll go to Washington to see Murphy. I was leaving Paris in any event.”

  “Yes, I know. We’ve been to your apartment. Your concierge said you gave it up. She also said the police had been there.”

  McGarvey waited.

  “Marquand is suddenly unavailable. Did you happen to see him, by chance?
”

  McGarvey nodded. “He told me to get out of Paris.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “That I was leaving this morning.”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  McGarvey’s flight was called again.

  “I didn’t tell him much, Tom, other than about my relationship with one of the passengers.”

  “And about me? About our little talk?”

  “No.”

  “It would be too bad if I found out differently.”

  “What about the pair you sent to Geneva? Care to comment?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lynch said with a straight face.

  “That shooter wasn’t gunning for Marta. My guess is that he was after your people.”

  “What’ll I tell the general?”

  “Tell him that I’ll drop by in the next couple of days,” McGarvey said getting to his feet. “Soon as I’m finished with my business in … Lausanne.”

  The COS flinched, but the reaction was too slight to draw any conclusions from. McGarvey suspected, however, that the general would know he was on his way to Switzerland probably before his flight cleared the Paris Terminal Control Area.

  Had Mati not been aboard flight 145, McGarvey knew he could have turned his back on the situation. But Marquand, the man’s cynicism notwithstanding, had read him correctly: McGarvey’s actions had betrayed him.

  McGarvey’s flight touched down just before 10:00 A.M. at Geneva’s busy Cointrin Airport, and he was among the first passengers to deplane and pass through customs. No one bothered to check his bag, in which he had hidden his disassembled pistol in his toiletries kit. Passengers traveling under U.S. documents were almost never checked. It was a long-standing tradition in Switzerland, probably because of the billions of American dollars on deposit in Swiss banks.

  It would not take very long, however, before his name on the passenger manifest rang some alarm bells and the Federal Police would begin looking for him. Before that he definitely wanted to show his face. And Lausanne was as good as any city to show it in.

  He rented a Ford Taurus from the Hertz counter and within the hour he had cleared Geneva and was heading the thirty-five miles on N1 along the north shore of Lake Geneva, the morning bright and warm.

  It had been a long time since he’d last been here, and coming back like this was dredging up a lot of memories, some pleasant, and others not quite so pleasant. And now his daughter Elizabeth was in country, attending school outside of Bern. He wanted to see her, or at least telephone, but if he was being watched she would be endangered.

  “The business has ruined our lives,” Kathleen had told him at the divorce hearing eight years ago. “I’ve got to get out, Kirk, before it completely swallows Elizabeth and me.”

  By that time the CIA had already fired him, and he’d had every intention of getting out. But he’d not protested the divorce, and it hadn’t been too long afterward that Trotter had come to Lausanne looking for him, asking him for help. “We can’t do it without you, Kirk,” he’d said. “Believe me, if there’d been another way, we would have taken it.”

  And so it had began, again, for him. And, he supposed, it would never stop until he got a bullet in his head.

  He pulled into a wayside park along the lake shore between Nyon and Rolle, about halfway to Lausanne, shortly before noon and reassembled his Walther PPK. Apparently no one had followed him from Paris, though he suspected Marquand’s people would be somewhere nearby. Nor were the Swiss on his tail yet. At least not outwardly.

  But, if the French intelligence officer had been correct in his assessment of the ex-STASI organization, they might have already spotted him. He did not want to become a sitting duck for some fanatic still fighting the Cold War.

  If someone shot at him, he was definitely going to shoot back. If, on the other hand, the Swiss Police caught up with him first, they would deport him immediately whether or not he was armed.

  Lausanne was a city of some quarter-million people, and the traffic was horrendous, partly because of the narrowness of the streets, and partly because at all times it seemed that the city was being torn down and rebuilt.

  McGarvey locked his bag in the trunk and had the Lausanne-Prince Hotel valet downtown park his car, before heading the two blocks over to the Place Saint-François on foot.

  He stopped at the news kiosk and bought a newspaper and the latest copy of Stern, the German newsmagazine. A photograph of the downed Airbus was on the cover.

  Across the square his old bookstore, International Booksellers, still occupied the same two-story yellow brick building. Marta had told him that his former Swiss partner, Dortmund Füelm, to whom he’d sold the store, still ran the place. Füelm had been one of the Federal Police watchdogs assigned to him, but when McGarvey had left, Füelm had retired, and stayed on at the store.

  No one had followed him from Geneva, and no one in the busy square seemed to be paying him or the bookstore any special attention, so, folding the newspaper and magazine and stuffing them under his arm, McGarvey crossed with traffic and went inside.

  Füelm, an old man, stooped and white-haired, was at the back of the small shop, speaking with two men about an expensive art book. He looked up, spotted McGarvey and did a double take, his eyes growing wide.

  He hurried over. “Gott in Himmel, I can scarcely believe my senses,” he cried, and he and McGarvey embraced.

  “You look fit, my old friend,” McGarvey said.

  “And you do as well,” the old man replied, the smile fading from his face. “I just learned last night about our little Mati.” He shook his head. “I’m so sorry, Kirk. We all are. She was so full of life.”

  “It’s why I came back. I thought perhaps I might speak with her parents, maybe her friends. She was in Paris to see me, you know.”

  Füelm nodded. “Yes, I know, Kirk. And believe me, I wish that you could stay in Switzerland, but it’s just not possible.”

  McGarvey stepped back, careful to keep his hands away from his jacket.

  “He’s armed,” Füelm told the two men who’d put down the art book.

  “We wish for no trouble, Herr McGarvey,” one of the men said. They both looked like professional boxers.

  “I didn’t come expecting trouble,” McGarvey said.

  One of the Federal cops took the pistol from McGarvey’s belt at the small of his back. Füelm had felt it during their embrace.

  “Then why are you armed, Kirk?” Füelm asked.

  “Old habits.”

  Füelm nodded sadly. “You must leave Switzerland immediately. These gentlemen will escort you back to Cointrin. Where do you wish to go? Back to Paris?”

  “Washington.”

  “Very well.”

  “I left a rental car at the Lausanne-Prince. My bag is in the trunk.”

  “The car has already been taken care of, Kirk. And your bag is on its way to the airport.”

  McGarvey smiled. “You Swiss can’t be faulted for lack of efficiency.”

  “No,” Füelm said. “And I’ll pass along your condolences to Mati’s people. She often spoke of you to them, and they always wanted to meet you. Her father especially.”

  “I’m sure they’re good people.”

  “Yes, they are,” Füelm said.

  He and McGarvey shook hands. “Take care, Dortmund.”

  Füelm leaned in close and lowered his voice. “Find the monsters who did this to our little Mati, Kirk. Find them, and kill them!”

  17

  MCGARVEY THOUGHT ABOUT OTTO RENCKE ALL THE WAY across the Atlantic from London, and by the time his Northwest flight touched down a few minutes before eight at Washington’s Dulles International Airport, he’d decided to use the man.

  No one was waiting for him at customs or in the Arrivals Hall, which was surprising. He thought that the Swiss would have sent word that he was coming in, just as an interagency courtesy.

  There was little doubt in his mind th
at Murphy wanted him involved in the Swissair business, just as the French did. But before he made any decision he needed more information than he expected the DCI would be willing to give him.

  He’d thought a lot about that between Geneva and London, and then on the long flight across the Atlantic, and he had come to the conclusion that if he could find Rencke and convince the man to help, he would go through the back door. With any luck he would learn what he had to know for his own safety before anyone out at Langley knew what was happening.

  Although he was getting no sense that anyone was behind him, or that anyone was watching, he thought it would happen sooner or later. “Trouble has a way of finding you,” he’d been told more than once. And it was true.

  He took a cab to the Marriott Key Bridge Motel and after it was gone he took another cab across the river to Union Station, where he took still another cab to the Holiday Inn Georgetown where he registered under the name of Tom Patton, paying with some of the cash he’d changed at the airport. For the moment, at least, he wanted anonymity here in Washington.

  As of a couple of years ago, Rencke lived with his computers and a dozen cats in an ancient brick house that had once been the quarters for the caretaker of Holy Rood Cemetery. Then he had been a computer systems consultant on a freelance basis for the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. His particular talent was an almost superhuman ability to visualize entire complex systems, including supercomputers, satellite links, data encryption devices, and all the peripheral equipment and connections that linked them, and make them user friendly.

  But at thirty-nine he was already a has-been from a dozen different jobs and callings. Trained as a Jesuit priest, he’d been, at twenty, one of the youngest professors of mathematics ever to teach at Georgetown University. But he liked women too much, so in 1974 he’d been fired from his job and defrocked all in the same day.